This text shows how and why Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia by a UN mandate.

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the "African country that works," Eritrea's apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the "high modernist" style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961-1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.

"Eritrea as home of nine ethno-linguistic and multi-faith groups has the potential ingredients of lethal identity-based conflicts. However, in spite of its potentially conflict-prone social structure, there have never been in the country's history generalized ethnic or faith-based violent conflicts; save the limited skirmishes that took place in Asmara in February 1950 between the Youth of the Muslim League and the youth of the Unionist Party. The civil wars between the ELF and EPLF during the first half and late 1970s and early 1980s had nothing or little to do with ethnicity or religion."--Publisher's website.

The book by Dr. Taddesse Tamrat is an important contribution. ... In fact, the author shows his full and precise knowledge of past literature on Ethiopia, and his critical analysis of historical events is well founded on the results of recent work; but also-and this is an important novelty-he had access to hagiographical and historical documents, kept in Ethiopian monasteries, which had not previously been known to scholars. ... - Professor Enrico Cerulli, in BSOAS, Vol. 37, 1972. Once in a long while, books are written that set the standard in their discipline. Taddesse Tamrat's Church and State has been just such a book, a classic in Ethiopian historiography, unsurpassed in its painstaking reconstruction of the medieval history of Ethiopia. Few historians have used the rich historical data of the gadl literature as exhaustively and as meticulously as Taddesse has done, teasing out crucial information as only an Ethiopian versed in church traditions could do. Equally significant for the value of the book has been the blending of these Ethiopian traditional sources with the rich contemporary Arabic sources and the commentaries and analyses of such authorities as Carlo Conti Rossini. In short, what Taddesse has done through this masterly reconstruction is to blaze the trail that other Ethiopian historians have followed, a process that culminated in the growth and ripening of professional Ethiopian historiography. - Professor Bahru Zewde is the author of A History of Modern Ethiopia Professor Taddesse Tamrat's magisterial historical work Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527, documents the rise and expansion of a new dynasty in highland Christian Ethiopia and the simultaneous growth of Ethiopian monasticism as an intellectual and cultural force. Based upon a broad range of primary sources previously either unknown or not utilized, this book remains the essential text for the history of the highland Christian state of Ethiopia during the period of its development as the dominant state in the Horn of Africa. This seminal work established the historical foundation for subsequent studies in the history of highland Ethiopia, including specialized cultural and historical analyses of theology, music and religious art. - Professor Marilyn E. Heldman is the author of African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia